January 12, 2001

Coveting Your Neighbor's Discipline

By MARJORIE GARBER

"Discipline envy" will be a familiar concept, even without any glossing. It's the wish, on the part of an academic discipline, to model itself on, or borrow from, or appropriate the terms and vocabulary and authority figures of another discipline. We might say the wish is on the part of "some members of" an academic discipline. But in fact anthropomorphism has its uses. And for me "discipline envy," which is very much a fact of life in my own academic discipline, literary studies, is a kind

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